For those of you who have ever loved, lost, or had your friends beat you into a coma with a baseball bat and then throw you down the stairs.

Bubbles rose to the surface of the oily water. Sarah gasped and dove hipfirst to rescue her Billybill. She immediately dropped to the bottom of the riverbed, where Bill was getting sucked down through the silt and covering his mouth with his exposed soles. Sarah grabbed him by the eyesockets and dragged him up, but he was stuck. Thinking fast, she twisted her body upside down and ate all the silt out around from him, freeing him, whereupon he floated to the surface.

Four weeks later, they were both rescued from a sea trolley by a man with a parasol decorated with glow in the dark Inspector Closeau decals.

I am a mighty dinosaur, and I am sinking into a tar pit. I don’t have to tell you that I regret several of my actions which led me to this point.

And still, my neck is very long, and the tar feels quite warm and comforting; which is in stark contrast to all of the suffocating it will be doing in a minute. But I have time to think

(Please stop complaining about my usage of “and”s and “but”s at the beginnings of sentences, and my misuse of the semicolon. I am a dinosaur, not a grammarian)

before I sink into the inky, crusty goo. I don’t have much time to think, just sit and think, these days. And I certainly won’t in a few minutes, ha ha.

Heh.

Times be hard for a dinosaur. The leaves all seem to have gone, and as delicious ferns and trees provide my only source of sustinence, I have had to walk long distances to simply fill my children’s bellies, much less my own. I hope it doesn’t get any colder, for their sake.

I bray a bit, but of course nobody can hear me.

If it does get much colder, most of my friends and family will die from starvation or the cold. I know Pops isn’t doing too well as it is; he certainly won’t be able to last another freeze like the one we had last week. If it gets any colder… could I be the last dinosaur to die warm?

Ha ha. Tarpit humor.

The main problem with it getting so cold is that it interrupts the carefully compiled instincts our tribe has slowly, slowly established over the many many years we’ve trodded around on this earth. Then it gets cold, and all the carefully constructed info about child rearing, food sources, and so on… it all just sinks into a tarpit.

Nice to have the company.

The problem with overriding a single instinct, such as where to find food, is that the whole groupthink tribal instinctive patterns just go at once, and every dinosaur has to think for themselves for every facet of their slow plodding existance, which often leads to disaster, misery, and some fool getting his fat ass stuck and dead in a tarpit.

Normally, if one of those sharp faced, whip tailed bastards had killed one of my children and dragged her steaming corpse into the woods, I would have cowered with the rest of the tribe.

But I was mad.

I wanted to stomp on their babies

I wanted to break them into red mud

I wanted them to feel pain

So I followed them

And now I’m up to my neck in tar. I struggle, I yell, and soon, very soon now, I’m going to die. I guess instincts are there for a reason, huh.

So as I begin to suffocate, I think- what’s the point of being big and strong if I can’t even protect my babies? What’s the point of anything if I just die breathing in tar, all alone? Has my entire life been as worthless as it seems now?

Hell, I haven’t even had a single worthwhile thought while sinking.

Ha ha.

The man behind me shouts. He can’t see what’s going on, he doesn’t know about the square, because of the wall. I laugh. It’s so simple. I take a pencil and, since the light has gone, diagram deep into the flesh where it once was. A noise like screaming. I show him the blood dripping down my skin, catching on the hairs and pooling in the button. He doesn’t seem to understand. I gesture towards the window with the crimson pencil, flinging specks of blood everywhere. I am frightened until I realize it’s the pencil that’s bleeding. I leave it in the man and continue on my way.

There is noise everywhere now. All I want to do is stand up, but I’m still in the chair… I think. By this point I’m not really sure it matters anymore. I am pleased by this inner monologue, and think I could have a career on the radio, if only the large men with guns would get out of my way. I make a mental note: head for radio station.

Janice points at me as I head for the door, her mouth working like a fish. I wave. I try to explain that I will not be back for some time, and that she can keep her chair, and that I will not be needing it any longer, but I am not sure she believes me. I get it, there is a process you must follow. You need to ask permission before leaving. I am a rebel, I suppose.

The men are gesturing for me to lie down. I giggle. Not unless you take me out to dinner, first.

The men come closer. I become worried. There is something I am forgetting. I remove my penis from it’s sheath and inspect it, but it remains intact. I leave it out, in case I need it later.

A gun so close to my face I can feel it breathing. I take it and point it at the Janice, and she falls down. I point it at the men, and one of them falls down. The other men go away somewhere, but I tire of their games so I do not pay attention to where. I step over the man on the ground and go outside.

There are lights on top of cars, spinning lazily in the hazy air. People shuffle about. The gun seems to be some sort of secret passkey in this place. I walk through the crowd, miraculously unharmed. I realize my penis is still out, and I feel ridiculous. I use the gun to remove it. There is a pop and a puff of red, and I fall down to my knees.

I feel like I went wrong somewhere, but I don’t know at what point. My arms are covered with blood. My gun is clicking uselessly at the people now, only two or three on the ground. I see the grass rush towards my face.

It is so cold and dark in this place.

I go to the mirror and smile brightly. You’ve still got it, girl. I pause for a moment and worry that I may have taken too much detomidine to simply go to the grocery store, but I try and pass the “heel to forehead” test. Built like a sarcophagus. Steel-Vein Samantha, that’s what they used to call me back in primary school.

I have a little extra time, so I meander over to the kitchen to look for my diaphragm. A girl can never be too careful at the supermarket. I open up a cupboard to get a face full of ground pepper. Not wanting to sneeze, I inhale deeply, coating the inside of my lungs. I idly wonder when I had enough time to fill the cupboard top to bottom with tightly packed black pepper. But there’s no time for idle anything right now, the detomidine is starting to take hold. I can feel its icy black fingers grappling onto the base of my spine, coddling and wrapping the nerves like spaghetti. I feel brackish, and then bold. I shudder. This is a very good day, I think, as the sun shines through the dried animal skins over the window pane, illuminating the wall with an auburn cracking glow.

My hair begins to hurt, and I lie down. I do a shot of tequila laced with camel hair and cough it up all over my sporty top. I realize if I am ever going to go to the grocery store, it should be now. I go.

I come back.

I put away the groceries, but cannot figure out where to put the five heads of lettuce, so I eat them raw and meowing.

So I bet you’re all wondering what I’ve been up to lately. The answer is, of course, playing a lot of Mass Effect. And by “playing”, I mean “dying”, and by “of” I mean “in”. I’m not exactly the best battle strategist, I guess. Probably why I never got into RTSs. That and my complete lack of understanding as to how I have to plop down a barracks if I want to create footsoldiers. Why can’t I plop down two young male/female humans and play some miniature Barry White and then just throw up a mandatory conscription into the army at age 18? Barracks don’t pop out soldiers, pregnant women do. Some day I’ll get that tattooed on somebody else’s trampstamp area.

Too soon?